12/16/2019
Map of Shark Attacks
How do people feel about sharks?
- Big teeth
- Sharp teeth
- Jaws theme
- Bad movies
- Big teeth
However, they’re important, and endangered.
- Many are predators that control the food chain effectively.
- As some become endangered, these ecosystems can fall out of balance.
- This can cause degradation and a reduction in important species to us.
- Conservationists have been working to preserve sharks, but have to work against this negative image.
Why the bad image?
- Jaws is the mass-media start of sharks being scary ocean monsters.
- Shows like Shark Week have romanticized shark attack stories.
- Overall, sharks are mostly associated with shark attacks.
Questions
- How frequent and bad are shark attacks?
- Also, how do journalism articles cover shark attacks?
- The Global Shark Attack File has records of shark attacks and links to sources.
- This project will focus on the United States, between 2010 and 2019.
Number of Attacks
- There are also some shark “interactions”, not just “attacks”.
Fatalities by State
Map colored by injuries
Infrequent, but still not the best
- Lacerations are scary and can happen pretty frequently.
Media Analysis
- In this presentation, I’ll compare two groups of articles.
- Two are about bad attacks in 2019 and two are about bad attacks in 2010.
- They’re short, so I’ll analyze them in pairs.
Sentiment comparison: 2010 and 2019.
However, let’s look closer.
Compare to Conservation Group.
What does this mean?
- Shark attacks aren’t frequent, but a lot of the injuries are still bad.
- When covering a shark attack, the focus is on the injury, which makes the shark seem scary.
- The conservation article seems to be even more focused on the injury than the news.
What can be done next?
- To improve a shark’s image, covering them outside of shark attacks may be the key.
- Analyzing more shark articles not focused on shark attacks can provide an interesting point of comparison.
- Additionally, analyzing and comparing these factors to countries like Australia may provide a lot of insight into other nation-specific factors of these effects.